Saturday, 18 August 2012

A Manifesto for the Content Industry 12. The gravy train has stopped; it’s time to get off.

You are no longer the gatekeepers to content and you no longer
have a monopoly. Lobby if you like (and we know you do) but you’d be better off
coming to terms with it and adapting.

Let’s go
back to the difference between middlemen and gatekeepers: What are you bringing
to the table? If you’re adding something to the mix (distribution, promotion,
technical expertise, access to fans / artists etc. etc.) then you’re a
middleman. If all you’re doing is charging people to get to the table then
you’re a gatekeeper and, let’s not beat around the bush, you’re doomed.

Before
the advent of recorded media things were pretty simple. If you wanted to listen
to some music you either played it yourself, went somewhere where someone would
be playing it or (for the very rich) paid for someone to come to you and play
it.

There
were no movies of course, but the theatre was there and off you went.

The
gatekeepers were just that, the men on the gate and, in some cases, the booking
agents, but they were relatively few and far between. The middlemen were the
tavern landlords, the ticket sellers and the folks who stuck up the bills.

With the
advent of recorded media the game changed. Suddenly the option of bringing the
entertainment to you existed for everyone, not just the very rich. But
producing, distributing and advertising this content was expensive, very
expensive. It also took a long time and required a lot of very specialist
resource.

This
meant there quickly became a clear divide between the amateurs and the
industry-backed professionals, a divide that led to a massively successful set
of industries for about 50-odd years and an ever expanding set of restrictions
on what could be done with the output of these industries.

Towards
the end of the last century, along with the rise of the personal electronics
and the increasing availability of home computing, three things happened that
started an inexorable change for these industries:

1)
cheaper hardware and software brought media creation capability to the masses.
Prices have continued to fall and quality has continued to rise to levels
unimagined just twenty years previously. £1000 will buy you a brand new
computer, the recording software, a solid-top acoustic guitar and a condenser
microphone. With that you could record music that will surpass a lot of the
stuff from some of the professional studios of the seventies and 80s.

2) The
internet arrived and then, critically, morphed into web2.0, shifting from being
yet-another-mass-media-distribution- channel to being a true many-to-many
distribution mechanism for User Generated Content (UGC). In the music world
sites like myspace (RIP), cdbaby, last FM, bandcamp, soundcloud, thesixtyone
and many others sprang up to help artists distribute and advertise their work
directly to fans. Amazon, Lulu and others are providing the same service for
authors and crowd-funding tools like Kickstarter are offering aspiring
film-makers and game designers (see 3) the chance to make this shift as well.

3)
Computer games and consoles made the shift from the arcade and nerdiness to the
front room and mainstream acceptance. In a world where digital content is
effectively infinitely abundant, disposable income is still depressingly
finite. The music, movie and publishing industries have been forced to adapt to
a new competitor for these entertainment dollars and, in general, it’s a
competitor that is born of the digital revolution and is reacting to the
changing world more quickly and more profitably.

Content
will always be produced, fans will always exist but the gates are going or, in
some places, have gone entirely. There will always be a place for those who can
add value to the connection between fan and creator, but if your business model
exists solely to stand at the gate demanding admission then your ex-customer
will just walk over the ruins of the walls around you.

Or, to
go back to the original metaphor, the gravy train has stopped at the buffers,
the passengers and artists have disembarked and are mingling on the platforms
planning new journeys on new trains, cars, planes, bicycles and everything else
under the sun. How long are you going to sit in the carriage waiting for them
to come back?